The Depressing Case for Never Waiting Your Turn in Traffic

Just a few hundred feet short of the "I-270 West—2 Miles" sign, traffic comes to a dead stinking halt. It's been like this for a few weeks now. The Ohio DOT is rebuilding one of my city's most heavily-traveled intersections from the ground up. A few weeks, or months, from now, there will be six lanes. Two will exit west, two will exit east, and two will continue north. Right now, we have three: two that exit east and just one for west and north. As a consequence, traffic in the latter lane comes to a daily halting crawl a few miles south of the split. Unfortunately, that's the one that I need, so I'm forced to sit and wait while the other two lanes flow free.

Unless, that is, I stay in those other lanes, skip the two-mile crawl, continue to hustle at 70mph, and then swing across the solid white line into my destination lane right before the split, forcing my way into whatever space someone has been been careless enough to leave open in front of them. Doing this gives me about twenty minutes of my life back. I can spend that time playing catch with my son, riding my exercise bike, playing the guitar, or sleeping. It's genuinely valuable to me.

The problem, of course, is that I was raised to wait in line, take my turn, and be courteous to others. I can justify skipping the line when I'm on my motorcycle, because I'm not really taking up any extra space when I'm sneaking back in, and also because it's frankly deadly to be sitting stopped dead in freeway traffic on a bike. Those sudden-stop accordion crashes that inconvenience Grand Cherokee and GMC Yukon owners can be fatal to the fellow on the VFR800 sitting between them. I don't want to spend twenty minutes watching my mirrors for the impact that I may or may not be able to avoid by dropping the clutch and heading for the shoulder.

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When I'm in a car, on the other hand… What gives me the right to be home any sooner than the hundreds of stopped drivers who are patiently waiting their turn? So I sit, and I wait, and I watch all the other drivers who speed past then cut back in. Every time one of those BMW X3 drivers (they're not all BMW X3 drivers, but I've never seen an X3 that was not doing it) pulls that trick, it means that the rest of us all get to wait an extra ten seconds or so.

I'm sure this tale of woe sounds vaguely familiar to you. Chances are that you've encountered a similar traffic situation yourself and found yourself presented with the same choices:

It's best for you, as an individual, to choose option a). Yet if everyone chose that option, there would be some remarkably unpleasant situations happening down at the business end of the line. At best, it would be like leaving Manhattan at rush hour, with cars filling every available space, attempting to honk and bully their way forward at every opportunity. At worst, there would be a variety of in-person confrontations ranging from strong words to a fusillade of 7.62x39 bullets.

Even if none of that happens, and you're the only person who decides to cut the line, there's always the chance that somebody who has been waiting in that line will lose their temper with you and give you a little tap in the fender… or more. I've seen that happen a few times, too.

So you're a sucker if you don't skip the line, and you're a cutter if you do.

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So you're a sucker if you don't skip the line, and you're a cutter if you do. Neither option is great, and both options have consequences. If only there was some kind of logical way to figure out which choice was best, right?

Turns out that there is, in fact, a logical way to figure out which choice is best. The situation is actually equivalent to a game-theory exercise called "The Prisoner's Dilemma." It goes like this: Two bank robbers are caught near the scene of the crime. They are taken into separate rooms and interrogated. If neither of them snitches on the other one, they will each receive a fairly light sentence—let's say three years—because there isn't enough evidence to prove they did it. If, on the other hand, both of them snitch, they will both get put away for ten years.

Now here's the interesting part: If one of them snitches but the other one doesn't, then the snitch will go free and the other one will wind up doing twenty years. So if you're one of those two bank robbers, then your eventual sentence depends both on what you do and what your accomplice does.

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For the past thirty-five years or so, game theorists have been staging computerized competitions between various possible strategies for the Prisoner's Dilemma. (You can find out more here.) A key component of these contests is that each "prisoner" in the contest has no way of knowing anything about the other "prisoner" it is facing; after all, these are just computerized strategies, not real people.

In the real world, of course, we tend to know a little bit about the people we would be robbing a bank with. I have friends who wouldn't snitch on me if they had a pistol put to their heads; I've also got friends who would start sobbing and snitching the moment they got put in handcuffs. So my strategy if I got pinched by the fuzz wouldn't be based on a successful algorithm; instead, it would be based on real-life experience with the other person.

Getty ImagesJeff Topping

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So here's the depressing part. The average American driver is, by default, fairly timid and fairly courteous. No, that doesn't apply to Chicago taxi drivers or that guy in the coal-rollin' F-350 who has his kangaroo bumper glued to the back window of your Geo Metro on I-40, but it applies to most of the drivers most of the time. Which means that if you decide to be that jerk who cuts around a long line of stopped traffic, someone is going to let you in. Because they were raised to be polite. Because they're anxious to avoid a confrontation. Because they just bought that nice new Lexus and they don't want to ruin the paint job teaching you a lesson. Because they have two children in the car and they value getting home safely more than they value their pride or ego.

In other words, this isn't the traditional Prisoner's Dilemma. It's a version of the Prisoner's Dilemma where you can always snitch and the other person will always keep quiet. Which means you get away with the crime and they suffer the penalty. Sure, there's a chance that one day you'll cut in front of the dude who decides to empty his Sig-Sauer into your back window, but that chance is vanishingly low. It almost always pays to be the jerk.

I know all of the above to be a fact. And yet I found myself sitting in the stopped lane yesterday afternoon, listening to music, twiddling my thumbs, feeling some mild annoyance at the black-bumpered Bimmers streaking past but generally content to serve my time and wait my turn. Maybe I'm just getting feeble and lazy in my late middle age. Or maybe there's another factor that can't be measured in terms of time or trouble. Call it karma, call it fate. Whatever you call it, there's a bit of satisfaction that comes with not being that line-cutting idiot up ahead. So if you're on Route 315 North in the next few months, chances are that you'll find my Accord living life in the slow lane. Not terribly smart, but reasonably satisfied nonetheless.

Born in Brooklyn but banished to Ohio, Jack Baruth has won races on four different kinds of bicycles and in seven different kinds of cars. Everything he writes should probably come with a trigger warning. His column, Avoidable Contact, runs twice a week.

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